Twenty-three years ago today, I stood in the newsroom with about 15 to 20 others watching the three TVs near the city editors’ desks. None of us there that early in the morning, mostly features and a few news staff members, could really fathom what we were seeing.

Some of us went to the TVs at the first report across the wire of a plane striking one of the towers of the World Trade Center, thinking it had to have been a horrible accident. The second plane erased that thought entirely.

Our world would never be the same.

While allies quickly came to our aid, a new wave of Islamophobia was unleashed that never quite went away. There had been waves before, including after a previous terror plot on the World Trade Center, and the Oklahoma City bombing (which was initially blamed on Muslim terrorism), but it wasn’t really till 9/11 that it gained a name.

Dalia Mogahed, a scholar at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding and former executive director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies, spoke to the Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley about the effects of Islamophobia on democracy, saying it affects it in at least three ways.

“First, the anti-Sharia legislation. The anti-Sharia legislation is really part of a larger problem,” she said, “as the same lawmakers that are targeting Muslims are targeting other minorities as well, and what the legislation does is it restricts people’s rights, and fosters a political climate that makes it easier to restrict those rights. With that, the rights of Muslim Americans are then restricted and the rights of other minorities are also restricted, and Islamophobia creates the political climate to make that possible, thus affecting democracy.

“Secondly, Islamophobia hurts our democracy in that it scares people, as Islamophobia is fueled by fear. Fear makes people more accepting of authoritarianism, conformity, and prejudice, and those three things undermine democratic principles, and it makes people less likely to dissent, to speak out, and to hold their government accountable. And thirdly, it manipulates people, and manipulates the public to consent to policies that they would otherwise not agree to.”

Islamophobia is still a factor in the U.S., but other fears have outpaced it in recent years, which has led us to where we are now, a nation led by fear and in danger of falling further in thrall to authoritarianism.

To those who pooh-pooh that idea, I offer up the recent efforts to curb rights of bodily autonomy, as well as attacks on libraries, among other things. As loath I am to invoke slippery-slope arguments, we do seem to be on that slippery slope as we speak, with actions to ban abortion by trying to convince people that abortions are being done willy-nilly up to the point of birth (which is ludicrous, especially considering that the health of the mother, both current and future, is the prime consideration for those late in pregnancy; if she dies or is rendered infertile by the continuation of a nonviable pregnancy, there won’t be future babies). Meanwhile, in vitro fertilization is caught in the riptide, thanks to a court ruling in Alabama that gave stored embryos the same legal protection afforded to children.

Efforts to limit gender-affirming care (typically based on a less than full understanding of what goes into gender transition, which takes years of medical and mental care before it even gets to the point of surgery; I mean, seriously, a certain candidate is suggesting schools are performing surgeries without parents’ knowledge) could similarly start to affect hormone and other therapy for cis people. Hormones for menopausal women, erectile-dysfunction drugs, plastic surgery … that could all believably be considered gender-affirming care.

No one wants a Wild West-style approach on either of these, but that they should be left mostly to doctors, with appropriate oversight (meaning medical professionals, not legislators). Keeping medical procedures legal and safe (that’s what that oversight is for) should be the aim, not making political points, especially by lying for the purpose of sowing division.

Fear, as Mogahed noted, is what we should be guarding against, not our fellow citizens. Fear divides us and makes it easier for those with less-than-noble aims to take advantage. They’re able to do this because they fool people into believing simplistic scenarios, such as the idea that librarians are grooming kids, that ignore nuance and truth. (Hey, the librarians I know are only interested in grooming kids to be lifelong readers.)

They don’t want you to grasp the common-sense reality that libraries already have rules and procedures in place to determine age-appropriateness of material, and separate sections, but instead want you to believe that books intended for teens and adults are shelved right beside copies of “The Velveteen Rabbit.” Even libraries with limited space separate sections, but legislators can make it more onerous, as those in Idaho did this year, forcing one small library to announce it would become “adults only” in July to avoid the possibility of breaking the law since it had no physical barriers between sections. It was able later to walk that back by using parent waivers for children, but it shouldn’t have had to make such plans in the first place since its procedures were already working.

They don’t want you to see that medical procedures, no matter what they are, should be between doctor and patient, with the safety of those procedures overseen by medical licensing boards.

And they really don’t want you to understand that if others’ hard-won rights are lost and you do nothing, your rights might be next. We need laws, but when the aim is not to ensure safety or equal protection but to make us fear and keep a segment of the population under onerous rule, we should question why.

Vote. It matters.